Martin Vander Weyer on Bill Clinton's criticisms of Barack Obama in his
new book Back to Work.

Bill Clinton will never be revered in old age like Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or mythologised like John F Kennedy.

There will always be something of the bad boy about him — the swagger, the easy phrase, the eye on the main chance and the prettiest reporter. He’ll be remembered as a president who politicked ruthlessly, under-delivered on his promises and (literally) stained the dignity of his office. Yet many Americans also now look back on his tenure from 1993 to 2001 as a time of relative social harmony, fiscal stability and economic progress, with a boom and bust at the end of it which was a mere blip compared to the turmoil of the past three years.

In this slim new manifesto, Clinton quotes statistics about budget surpluses, growth rates and numbers of citizens shifted out of poverty that prove his point. He ignores the argument that the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis were planted during his time — in the encouragement of subprime lending to underpin the shift out of poverty, in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that separated retail banking from securities trading, and in the Federal Reserve’s adherence to low interest rates that made speculative profit too easy.

But on balance he’s not far wrong. Measured purely by outcomes at the time, his style of economic management, including higher taxes on the wealthy and bigger government generally, worked better than what came after. And his style of communication, though it may have lacked sincerity, was a lot more effective in office than that of the sincerely disappointing Barack Obama.

So even if, like me, you would never have voted for Bill, and whatever his motives may be for writing this book — ostensibly to attack the “anti-government” Tea Party tendency but perhaps also, in Hillary’s interest, to take an oblique swipe at Obama — it’s refreshing to hear from him.

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His theme is about getting America back to work, or in the inelegant sound bite he seems to prefer, “back in the future business”. To do that, he proposes an aggressive agenda of interventions that will be anathema to the anti-government folks, whose anger at government failings has, in his view, been hijacked by wealthy corporate interests that just want the taxman off their backs.

He advocates a Keynesian surge of infrastructure spending, pointing out that the US now ranks 24th in the world (just below Malaysia) for the quality of its infrastructure. He briefly annexes the territory of his former vice president Al Gore by sermonising about climate change, but in his worldly way he sees the problem as an opportunity for large-scale job creation — through initiatives such as a nationwide “retrofit” programme to maximise the energy efficiency of every public building.

He wants tax incentives for US corporations to repatriate funds in order to invest at home, to “insource” jobs that have been outsourced abroad, and to hire the long-term unemployed. He wants America to raise its game in hi-tech manufacturing and export performance.

Some of this is what we might call Democrat apple pie, but some of it displays original thinking. Clinton dismisses the anti-government case — that the best way to create jobs is to let markets and entrepreneurs get on with it, impeded by the barest minimum of tax and red tape — as nihilistic and socially divisive. But he skates around the essential questions of what his initiatives and incentives would cost, how ratings agencies and buyers of US government debt would react, and how long his new New Deal might take to pay off in terms of deficit elimination. Like the welfare-to-work crews he envisages painting black roofs white so they absorb less heat, he’s in broad-brush mode.

But at the core of the new Clintonism is at least one big idea that policy-makers on this side of the Atlantic would do well to adopt: the link between energy efficiency and future prosperity. Whatever the right balance between public and private investment, that must surely be a path to pursue. There’s an upbeat, front-foot tone to Back to Work that is welcome at a time of despair. Love him or hate him, he hasn’t lost his touch.